A blog about an average girl who just happens to have Cerebral Palsy

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Tag: work

This week I did something for the first time: I took annual leave from work. It was…weird.

I wasn’t originally planning on taking any leave this early into my six month contract; I didn’t feel like I’d really ‘earned’ any yet. However, the end of the financial year was approaching and I needed to use some up – so I booked a couple days off.

The act of requesting leave was an odd mixture of exciting and scary. I was expecting the former but not the latter. It was hard for me to reason with myself that having annual leave is an important part of working life. It isn’t all that surprising, considering that before this job came along, I had convinced myself that I would never, ever, get to call myself an employee.

I’ve adjusted my body clock to working hours; getting up on time and going to sleep early enough that I’ll still be able to function in the morning, but, to be honest, I’m still working on accepting that I’m worthy of a job. I had to fight the urge to check my work e-mails approximately every five minutes.

This weekend is Easter weekend. Here in the UK that means that we don’t work on Good Friday or Easter Monday. I feel completely different about this. The rest of my team are off work too. This feels okay. It feels like I’m ‘allowed’ (by my own standards) to relax this time. I was holding myself back before. I know that.

I also know I need to work on that. This is an important step in my working life. I hope there are more to come.

Like this:

I looked forward to them because all of my family and friends were employed, so weekends meant I could spend time with them. Plus, for two days a week it felt like it didn’t matter that my body clock was a mess because lots of other people would be staying up late and sleeping in. I felt like everyone else. For most of it.

The hardest day of the week for me it the five and a half years I was jobless wasn’t, as you might think, a Monday morning. By the end of it I’d reached the point where I mostly slept Monday morning (well, most mornings actually) away so that I wouldn’t be as lonely.

Sundays, especially the afternoons and evenings, sucked way more.

Everyone would spend it complaining that they didn’t want to go to work the next day and I couldn’t wait until I could say that sort of thing too, even if I didn’t mean it. I hated knowing that another Monday was about to go by without a shiny new job for me to go to.

Now, after two months of working, I look forward to weekends because I feel like I’ve earned them. Sundays don’t suck any more, and I haven’t quite reached the point where I have that ‘Oh poop, it’s Monday tomorrow’ feeling. I’m sure that will come in time though.